Want to be the landlord for a bar on Broadway? Got $100 million laying around?
If so you’re in luck, because the building that’s home to Jelly Roll‘s Goodnight Nashville just hit the market.
The 5-story, 31,000 square foot bar located at 209 Broadway just opened this past February, a partnership between the country music superstar and Phoenix-based Evening Entertainment Group. The venue was originally going to open up under the company’s Bottled Blonde concept, which has several locations around the country, before the partnership with Jelly Roll.
Listing materials from CBRE offer buyers “a rare opportunity to acquire Jelly Roll’s Goodnight Nashville, located in the heart of Nashville’s famous Lower Broadway district, aka Honky Tonk Highway.” (Nobody calls it the Honky Tonk Highway. Don’t try to make that a thing). The ad also promises the future owner of the building “long-term, increasing cash flows backed by a nationally recognized entertainment operator.”
The building is brand new, having just been completed in 2024, and is currently owned by BB Broadway LLC.
It sounds like the bar has already signed a long term lease for the building, which will carry over to the new owners. According to the Nashville Business Journal, a spokesman for Goodnight Nashville confirmed that the bar will continue to operate after the building is sold, citing the partnership with Jelly Roll as making the venue one of the top-performing bars on Broadway.
(And I have no doubt that he’s right on that one. It’s one of the few bars that always seems to be packed with a line out the door).
The $100 million price tag means the venue is listed for around $3,192 per square foot, which is still well below the price per square foot of Jack’s Bar-B-Que, which sold recently to the owners of Robert’s Western World for over $4,200 per square foot. And it’s also lower than the asking price for the building that currently houses Jon Bon Jovi’s bar, JBJ’s Nashville, which is listed for $130 million or over $3,500 per square foot.
The astronomical property values show just how hot the market is on Broadway right now, an area with limited space that’s seen explosive growth over the past decade or so. But the fact that so many property owners are choosing to exit so soon after getting their bar up and running would also seem to indicate that they believe property values have topped out, and that the real value is from the bars themselves and not the real estate.
While Nashville tourism is still booming, and Broadway is the epicenter of the action, there are signs that the market for artist bars is becoming oversaturated. While some of the massive venues are still packed on a nightly basis, others have far smaller crowds as newer and bigger venues continue to pop up.
Of course that doesn’t mean that we won’t see any more artist bars open up on Broadway: Kane Brown is reportedly in the works to take over the recently-closed Valentine, and as we saw when Florida Georgia Line broke up and FGL House rebranded to Lainey Wilson’s Bell Bottoms Up, there’s no shortage of artists wanting to get in the bar game.
Just how many of these bars downtown Nashville can sustain? Well, I guess we’ll have to wait and see. But it feels like we’re getting close to the limit.
